Intellectual property law is good. Excess in intellectual property law is not. This blog is about excess in Canadian and international copyright law, trademarks law and patent law. I practice IP law with Macera & Jarzyna, LLP in Ottawa, Canada. I've also been in government and academe. My views are purely personal and don't necessarily reflect those of my firm or any of its clients. Nothing on this blog should be taken as legal advice.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Public Domain Day 2008

The redoubtable, public domain loving Wallace McLean was an hour early this year with his list of notable and obscure creators whose works entered the public domain, or maybe entered the public domain, or did so in some respects here but not in other ways and maybe there but maybe not here....go figure...

Some notables include Jean Sibelius, who is both highly overrated and underrated...who died in 1957...and whose turgid, frigid, and haunting symphonies would now make excellent fodder for movie scores about bleak northern landscapes and dark Jungian dreams....

But watch out for international issues, conflict of laws problems, etc. As I told the IPKat:

A real problem arises when copyright owners in life + 70 countries try to assert rights extraterritorially in life + 50 countries such as Canada. We had an unpleasant reminder of this earlier this year in Canada from Universal Edition AG of Vienna which threatened a CDN website with lots of PD in Canada scores, including, incredibly, Mahler who died in 1911. Which is a lot more than 70 years ago....

I’ve proposed something potentially useful for WIPO to do along these lines, namely a Public Domain treaty - that might do something to resolve some of the ET and conflict of laws issues... and give WIPO something actually useful and achievable to do...rather than, for example, chasing after a broadcasters’ rights treaty that few want and nobody needs....

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So, Happy New Year to everyone.....and try do do some good deeds to compensate and atone if it transpires that due to irresistible urges you feel some attraction and secret passion for works in the public domain. You might consider a voluntary donation to Access Copyright (to move it along on its elusive public domain registry) or the RIAA, to help it save great music from extinction by using legally protected DRM to render it all but unusable, and then suing those who love it the most, and to bring such incentives to Canada.

It's true that Bach, Mozart, and Stravinsky didn't have the same incentives, such as life + 70 years, that now drive Britney Spears and others to such lofty creative heights. Nor did they have copyright lawyers whose skills and ingenuity were a match those of modern times...if only they had, the world would surely have been different...